Council chief explains why report was secret
Portfolio plans will be made clearer, authority says
The future of the council’s £50million property portfolio will be made clearer come next year, Maidstone Borough Council insists. Last year MBC commissioned Gen2 to carry out a review of around 300 sites owned by the local authority. The report was never made public, but a leaked version raised concerns over village greens and other open spaces.
Since the report was handed to MBC, it has worked on its own property asset management strategy, which it hopes to publish early next year.
Mark Green, director of finance and business investment, said: “We didn’t necessarily agree with all of Gen2’s recommendations and that’s one of the reasons we didn’t publish the report.
“If we had published Gen2’s report landowners with property next to our assets may have held us to ransom, in that sense it is commercially sensitive.
“Since it was published we’ve been developing our own asset management strategy, looking at the property portfolio and seeing what we think we should do, whether that is developing sites, improving them for future use. We’ll take into account what Gen2 have said but we didn’t just accept everything they recommended.”
Earlier this year the authority was the subject of the KM’s Protect Our Play campaign, calling on the council to remain as open as possible on the discussion of disposing of or developing sites around the borough.
Speaking exclusively to the Kent Messenger this week, Mr Green said: “If we put documents out in the public that were redacted it would get quite difficult.
“People may tend to focus on the stuff that has been blacked out and speculate. “I would prefer for us to publish our own strategy showing how we plan to use the borough’s assets. There’s no reason for us to be secretive.” On Monday, the council’s Policy and Resource’s Committee discussed an item regarding Granada House. The Grade II listed building is set to have an extra storey added to make room for new flats along Gabriel’s Hill. Mr Green explained why it was kept from the public: “There’s a reason why it’s confidential; we’re still talking to potential contractors about what happens at Granada House. We don’t have detailed designs for the site yet.”